Nov 3, 2014

By now you have probably heard about POODLE which looks like it will kill SSL 3.0. If you haven't here is a description from US-CERT:

The SSL 3.0 vulnerability stems from the way blocks of data are encrypted under a specific type of encryption algorithm within the SSL protocol. The POODLE attack takes advantage of the protocol version negotiation feature built into SSL/TLS to force the use of SSL 3.0 and then leverages this new vulnerability to decrypt select content within the SSL session. The decryption is done byte by byte and will generate a large number of connections between the client and server.

Microsoft has announced that they will be making a hotfix available that disables SSL 3.0 for Internet Explorer in the registry. You can do that yourself though via group policy be making the following setting:

In Group Policy Manager create a new Group Policy Object called TLS Settings